Back in the mists of time when most worthwhile music software was mostly shareware or freeware because nobody could afford the thousands of pounds for the high end stuff, packages like Rubberduck reigned supreme.

The ultimate bass synthesiser, Rubberduck had a sequencer based loosely on an ancient but still well thought of Roland product called the TB303. This was a great parping old bass synthesiser and was instrumental, if you’ll forgive the expression, in creating a lot of hit beats in the 80s and 90s.

Time passes and these things sound a little bit retro. But still the TB303 manages to fetch high prices on eBay and elswhere. You can’t get them just anywhere, so being able to download Rubberduck for free has got to be a better bet. It still has a lot to recommend it, and even in spite of its age I’d say it’s an essential tool in any computer musician’s arsenal. Get all the rubber you can handle at the new d-Lusion web site.

Podcasts are a good source of information and entertainment. While most take the form of talk radio or music shows, the audiobook is on the rise, although these are mostly amateur affairs. But slowly there are professional writers creeping into the market.

Hugo award winner James Patrick Kelly is podcasting his “On the Net” columns from the popular Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazines. In these columns, Kelly talks about time travel, faster than light engines etc, all the usual fare of popular science fiction.

The most recent episode was about copyright, science fiction, DRM, and the future of the Internet. Fascinating stuff. Subscribe to the show by following this LINK.

No that’s guitar TUNER. And having one of these online is a total boon. If you play guitar there is one thing that’s the bane of your life. Staying in tune. Say you went to someone’s house and he hasn’t got a guitar tuner and you forgot yours? Or worse still you go to play a concert and your tuner gets mislaid on the way, or falls out in the van, the guy can’t remember where he parked it and… okay, you get the idea.

This online guitar tuner at Guitar For Beginners plays you the right notes in the right order. The recordings of the guitar notes are beautiful, and ring on for long enough for you to sound your own note and tune it in with the recording. Genius. Really lovely site, really well done. Lots of open tunings too, so you can sound really good and pose a lot without having to concentrate so much on being able to play.

AT&T have some really wonderful speech synthesis software, and in a feat of precedented generousness they are sharing it with you! Yes you,because if you go over to AT&T and type in a coherent phrase or even a disjointed string of garbage, the AT&T software speech robot will dutifully speak it.

The really cool part is that unlike a lot of other online speech synths, you can speak your words in a variety of ethnicities. You have US and UK English, Spanish, French, Canadian French, German and Indian English. Wow. Makes you want to type all kinds of stuff just to hear them say it, doesn’t it? Yes it does. And you will, believe me.

Magpie and Magpie Pro are very specialist software. What they do is allow animators to figure out what mouth shapes to animate when adding visuals to avoice. It’s called lip sync. Actors record voices, and animators hear those words and draw or fashion from clay,the expressions and mouth shapes of the characters. Sounds simple, but it’s really not.

Magpie and it’s big brother Magpie Pro make this easy by loading the sound file up and breaking it down into frame sized pieces. Then you can assign a mouth shape to the syllables you hear, frame by frame. Then you can play the sound and watch the mouth. If it matches and looks good, you’re done, if not it’s back to the old drawing board. Magpie makes it simple.

Find all the details and demo download at Third Wish Software.

CDBurnerXP Pro is CD/DVD burning software with quite a lot to offer, considering it’s totally free!

It supports creation of multi-session disks, which is always useful if you have disc you want to keep coming back to add data or files to. It also creates Audio-CDs from mp3, wav, ogg and wma files. In addition to CD burning, you can also rip audio CDs, normalize WAV files, encode MP3 files, and erase disks. All this and it supports use of high write speeds too.

It’s able to write CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+R/RW, DVD-R/RW discs, creating either data or video discs. It can also rip audio-CDs, burn and create ISO images, convert WAV files to MP3 and vice versa, verify discs after burning, create bootable discs, print covers for your creation, convert BIN/NRG to ISO, etc. It supports Burn on the Fly and Burn-Proof hardware.

If you’ve been looking for CD/DVD burning software but don’t have money to burn, you won’t be playing with fire if you check out this freeware software right here! Some screenshots of this tool ‘in work’ can be found here.

If you’ve had problems using plug-ins, tubes or other add-ons in a graphics, video or animation application then you might find this software, which I recently came across, very useful. It’s called Plugin Commander.

Plugin Commander is a tool for dealing with various image formats, plugins and effect types from various graphics applications. It allows you to manage and preview your plugin, tube and add-on collection quickly and easily. You can deactivate the plug-ins you rarely need and define how your favorite effects will appear in the host application.

There are two editions of this useful software, the commercial Pro Edition and the Light Edition, which is freeware. The light edition being freeware has limited features but to enjoy a fully-featured version, it’s best you go for the Pro Edition.

CHECK IT OUT!

Get it on tape! Well, the modern digital version! Here’s a useful program that can record almost all sound from your sound card with good quality. It can also record from the microphone, line-in, and just about any programs such as your media player of choice.

For example you might wanna record an internet radio show. You can easily do that with this, and what’s more, it can record straight to mp3 format,saving you valuable disc space! To get an even small file size, mp3 modes are fully configurable.

Additional features include voice activation, file length limitation (so that it can’t make overly huge files) and schedule (how about recording your favorite internet radio show while you’re asleep or at work?) and it can even stop recording automatically.

Sounds like it could be the perfect solution for almost any situation where you might wanna record and save audio from your computer? You can download a demo (limited to recording 3 minutes) and more find out more info right here.

YamiPod is a freeware standalone iPod manager which allows you to manage the content of your iPod without the need to have iTunes installed. It needs no installation and can be run directly from your iPod. So,for example, it doesn’t matter if it is not your computer where you want to run it, you still can!

It comes with many useful features such as iPod ‘notes’ editing features, exporting your song list to HTML, management for duplicate files, the ability to locate lost music files, AAC file support and of course PC to iPod synchronization! It can automatically download the latest version and includes a built in music player.

This is a worthwhile alternative to the official iPod client which many people think is bloated and overrated. Personally i think iPods are overrated anyway as mp3 players existed long before they claimed the market, but if you have an iPod, this alternative is definitely worth checking out!

It’s freeware and you can get more info and download it from here.

Pandora is an internet radio station site, but with a twist! It knows what you might like, before you’ve even heard it! You simply type in the name of a song or artist, and it generates a playlist of similiar sounding songs and artists! It bases its findings on musical similiarity, not popularity, only the music counts!

It’s part of the ‘Music Genome Project’ an attempt to group thousands of songs by musical similarity. Everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like. You can even give a “Thumbs Up”, which makes that song and songs that sound like that song play more often or “Thumbs Down” bans that song from that station, and makes songs that sound like that song play less often.

It’s a great way to discover new music based on what you already know you like. I like how they even provide links to more info on each band or artist, so if you find something you like you can easily learn more info!

Start listening right now by going here!